Free Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams by C. L. Moore Page B

reasonless buffeting of insanity, but a wilder, more incomprehensible insanity than the sane mind could understand.
    Something frantic within him clamored for instant, headlong flight — he heard Yarol's breathing panicky behind him and knew that he too wavered on the verge of bolting — but something insistent at the roots of his brain held him firm before the whiteness bearing down in its aura of madness — something that denied the peril, that hinted at solution.
    Scarcely realizing that he had moved, he found the heatgun in his hand, and on a sudden impulse jerked his arm up and sent a long, blue-hot streamer of flame straight at the advancing apparition. For the briefest of instants the blue dazzle flashed a light-blade through the dark. It struck the floating whiteness full — vanished— Smith heard a faint crackle of sparks on the invisible floor beyond and knew that it had passed through the creature without meeting resistance. And in that flashing second while the blue gaze split the thickness of the dark he saw it shine luridly upon a splinter of rock in its path, but not upon the white figure.
    No blaze of blueness affected the deathly pallor of it — he had a sudden conviction that though a galaxy of colored lights were played upon it no faintest hint of color could ever tinge it with any of man's hues. Fighting the waves of madness that buffeted at his brain, he realized painfully that it must be beyond the reach of men — and therefore— He laughed unsteadily and holstered his gun.
    “ Come on ,” he yelled to Yarol, reaching out blindly to grasp his comrade's arm, and — suppressing a tingle of terror — plunged straight through that towering horror.
    There was an instant of blaze and blinding whiteness, a moment of turmoil while dizziness swirled round him and the floor rocked under his feet and a maelstrom of mad impulses battered through his brain; then everything was black again and he was plunging recklessly ahead through the dark, dragging a limply acquiescent Yarol behind him.
    After a while of stumbling progress, punctuated with falls, while the white horror dropped away behind them, not following, though the muffling dark still sealed their eyes — the almost forgotten light in Smith's hand suddenly blazed forth again. In its light he faced Yarol, blinking at the abrupt illumination. The Venusian's face was a mask of question, his black eyes bright with inquiry.
    “What happened? What was it? How did you — how could we—”
    “It can't have been real,” said Smith with a shaky grin. “I mean, not material in the sense that we know. Looked awful enough, but — well, there were too many things about it that didn't hitch up. Notice how it seemed to trail through the solid floor? And neither light nor dark affected it — it had no shadows, even in that blackness, and the flash of my gun didn't even give it a blue tinge. Then I remembered what that little fellow had told us about his three gods: that, though they had real existence, it was on such a widely different plane from ours that they couldn't touch us except by providing themselves with a material body. I think this thing was like that also: visible, but too other-dimensional to reach us except through sight.
    And when I saw that the floor didn't offer any resistance to it I thought that maybe, conversely, it wouldn't affect us either. And it didn't. We're through.” Yarol drew a deep breath.
    “The master-mind,” he gibed affectionately. “Wonder if anyone else ever figured that out, or are we the first to get through?” .
    “Don't know. Don't get the idea it was just a scarecrow, though. I think we moved none too soon. A minute or two longer and — and — I felt as if someone were stirring my brains with a stick. Nothing seemed — right. I think I know now what was wrong with those other two — they waited too long before they ran. Good thing we moved when we did.”
    “But what about that darkness?”
    “I